Francis D. Klingender (1907-1955) : an intellectual biography

Abstract

This thesis explores the life, work and contexts of the Marxist art historian, cineaste and sociologist Francis Donald Klingender.  The thesis starts by delineating the familial and cultural context to Klingender’s early years in Goslar, suggesting the significance of paternal influence, both in respect of Francis Klingender’s developing aesthetic ideas, but also, by contradistinction, his nascent Communism. It suggests that the industrialised hinterland of the Harz Mountains informed Klingender’s eventual approach to the representation of landscape in Art and the Industrial Revolution. This chapter concludes that Klingender, through his own academic study and from various external political engagements, had already developed the essential political and anthropological ideas which informed his sociology of art before he met the Hungarian émigré, Frederick Antal in 1933.

This thesis asserts that the various Comintern and Communist-orientated organisations, including employment for the Soviet Trade legation, provided Klingender as a relatively recent émigré, with a surrogate and supportive network which informed and supported his political and cultural aspirations. It evaluates Klingender’s co-authored essay Money Behind the Screen, his association with Grierson and his wider engagement with film as a cultural and political medium with revolutionary potential. The next section delineates Klingender’s A/A involvement and the subsequent art historical work authored under its auspices between 1934-1948. It evaluates Klingender’s approach to abstraction and Soviet Realism. The penultimate section considers the final years of Klingender’s life from 1948-1955 and the personal repercussions of the Cold War.

The concluding section explores the probable rationale behind Klingender’s decision to leave the Communist Party of Great Britain.

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